H. Travis, Peace Activist

Court Upheld Her Right To Visit Cuba

Helen Levi Travis, a peace and social activist and the subject of a 1967 Supreme Court ruling that upheld her right to travel abroad, died on Nov. 14 in San Pedro, Calif. She was 86.

Born in Manhattan, Mrs. Travis she took a student trip to the Soviet Union in 1934 and was impressed with the promises of socialism. After graduation she started traveling extensively with her first husband, Abbott Simon, a leader of the radical left-wing American Youth Congress.

In the wake of the German-Soviet treaty of 1939, the couple established a clandestine "safe house" outside Prague to hide anti-Fascist activists from Spain, Italy and Czechoslovakia.

She returned to the United States, where she taught English, worked in an automobile assembly plant and wrote for the Communist Party publication, Daily Worker. Her brief marriage ended in divorce, and she met and married Robert C. Travis, an organizer of the bloody sit-down strike in Flint, Mich., of 1936-37, which forced General Motors to accept the United Automobile Workers as the strikers' bargaining agent.

Mrs. Travis had her encounter with the government in the 1960s. She was charged with visiting Cuba twice in 1962 without a passport stamped valid for that destination.

She was found guilty, given two suspended six-month sentences and fined $10,000. A federal appeals panel upheld her conviction, but the Supreme Court threw it out in 1967.

In the late 1950s, where Mrs. Travis was a Los Angeles social services caseworker, she headed the Fellowship for Social Justice of the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles and was active in a group for Central American refugees.